So hi there. It's been a while since I've written. I thought I was "done" blogging, done dealing with "it," and wanted to be anything but focused on the past. I moved back in with my parents at the end of July...and it has been rough. The IBS and GERD have been awful, I've been having more headaches, and haven't been sleeping well. I've been trying over-the-counter acid reflux meds and those are helping a bit for the GERD, and I've been trying over-the-counter sleeping meds as well but those aren't helping much- they make me tired and I'll fall asleep fairly easily with them but I wake several times during the night.
I am not even sure exactly what my issue is being there because I think it's a lot of things. It's being around the abuser; it's being around my mother who didn't believe the hardest thing I've ever had to say; it's feeling that I can't trust the people I live with; it's feeling like I don't live in a "home;" it's their underhanded comments at the dinner table- not even just about me, but about my sisters as well; it's the way my dad talks to my mom so disrespectfully; it's worrying that their negativity will take a toll on my daughter's self-confidence as it did (and perhaps still does) mine...
Both parents will make underhanded comments about one of my sisters and how she "dropped out" of an expensive college (to which she had some scholarships) and "left them" with some student loans they'd gotten for her. This was a few years ago and she has since been going to a good school much farther away in an area she's much happier studying. She has also stopped talking to them. No calls or cards on holidays or birthdays, she told them that as long as they continue to treat her with such negativity she will not have contact with them. She is strong and brave and I look up to her for this decision. I can witness how difficult it is to heal scars while in the presence of those who caused them. Because they make underhanded comments about me as well. Just last night- at the dinner table- we were talking about kids and their food choices and when it's appropriate to stop monitoring "Did you eat your vegetables?" before they're allowed a sweet treat. I said something about 16 seemed an OK age to stop worrying about this (though in retrospect I would think 13 or 14 should be old enough to have this discretion). So my dad says "Are you sure 16 is a good age for that? 16-year-old girls are about the dumbest people on the planet. Their thought processes..I just do not understand." Why did he say this? Because when I disclosed the CSA, I was 16. That was the age I "told on" him, or in his-and much of my family's eyes, that I "went crazy and lied."
My youngest sister has also made some comments about how I made her life worse by forcing our father our of the house, making CPS have her talk to the police investigator, and basically turning her childhood for the worse (she was 6 at the time). I have a lot of guilt about what my younger sisters went through as a result of my telling about the abuse and sometimes I wish I'd just kept my mouth shut and kept dealing with things on my own until I was gone for college. But part of me was trying to protect them. Her comments hurt more than my parents'.
So disclosing CSA makes you one of the "dumbest people on the planet." This got me thinking about the other meaning of "dumb" - the archaic and totally non-PC meaning, mute. I had finally broken out of muteness and secrecy at this age. Although I don't bring it up with them at all anymore, and haven't since I initially disclosed, mostly because it was clear I wasn't and am never going to be believed by most of the family and I've accepted that it's pointless to try. Making the ones who don't believe change their minds (mostly, my mother) is futile and doesn't really matter- I know what happened and though validation helps it isn't necessary.
It is just so frustrating. My parents will both say they have "forgiven and forgotten" - about anything negative in the past, my sister's student loans, my disclosing the abuse (even though that isn't really anything needing forgiveness from them- it should be the other way around, but in their eyes it wasn't disclosure, it was a lie) yet they continue to bring things up with underhanded comments for guilt or manipulation or I don't even know what. And I am not sure how to deal with this, short of telling them outright to shut the hell up (which isn't something I'm very good at). Because of my financial situation it looks like I'll be there for a few months to a year. Aghhh! I just want to get my daughter and myself out of that negative environment.
